Gilead

1 About this book

Gilead is a 2004 novel by American writer Marilynne Robinson. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is Robinson's second novel, following Housekeeping (1980).

Gilead is an epistolary novel, as the entire narrative is a single, continuing, albeit episodic, document, written on several occasions in a form combining a journal and a memoir. It comprises the fictional autobiography of John Ames, an elderly, white Congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa (also fictional), who knows that he is dying of a heart condition.

At the beginning of the book, the date is established as 1956. Ames explains that he is writing an account of his life for his seven-year-old son, who will have few memories of him. Ames indicates he was born in 1880. He said that he was seventy-six years old at the time of writing.

Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

• Family life
• Domestic fiction
• Reminiscing in old age
• Fathers and sons
• Children of clergy
• Grandfathers
• Conflict of generations
• Clergy